The Soft Black Stars by Matthew Buckley Smith. Rattle. 2026.
Reviewed by Hilary Menos
Don’t get me wrong – I love rhyme. But in The Soft Black Stars, rhyme pretty quickly becomes a Thing. Before I had even finished reading the text of this pamphlet I had worked through the whole twenty pages with a pencil marking up the rhyme schemes – ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, for example. Yes, there are sonnets, four to be precise. Buckley Smith does vary his form and his rhyme schemes with, say, sixteen lines ending GHGH, or eighteen lines of ABC ABC DEF DEF etc., or ABBA CDDC etc. Not every poem is so stolidly constructed. But when you regularly add heavy end-stopped rhyme to a five-beat line, not precisely iambic but approaching it, the work risks sounding a little ploddy to a contemporary ear – although in comic mode, it may be fun.
Nevertheless, the reader may find the style in The Soft Black Stars more twentieth than twenty-first century, a feeling strengthened by the capitalized first letter of each line. Depending on your taste, this can attract – or detract. From the opening poem, “Sonnet for My Daughters”:
Tucking you in at night I sometimes think
Of what a piece of shit I used to be,
Of the girls I drove to dinner and to drink,
Whose dads were once pieces of shit like me
A poet has to work hard, and with skill, to make a poem with these constraints sing. In the previous quotation, to me the beginning of the third line feels rushed, and I’m uneasy about the conflict between the iambic norm and natural speech rhythm in the last line.
A strong commitment to rhyme can also impede flow, and lead to odd word order. Not necessarily, of course. But there is at least a risk of sounding contrived. “Meditations,” I think, falls into this trap: “They tell us that it’s better not to know, / The Romans and the Greeks, too much about / the days that lie ahead.” Inversions like this rarely work.
Meanwhile, “To His Heart” ends:
[…] that the steady
Pulse you’ve carried all these years amounts
To nothing in the end but aimless patter –
Take comfort knowing that it doesn’t matter.
None of this matters. No, none of this counts.
Repetitions often do work, but is this a little jingly? Perhaps it depends on reader taste. (What this does do, for me, is call to mind that lovely poem “Rain” by Don Paterson, the title poem of his 2009 collection, which ends, “and none of this, none of this matters”.)
Buckley Smith writes best when he lets rhyme slip away a bit, and allows the form to loosen, as in “Exes,” which opens:
Renée was just a way of getting back some savor of the girl who came before the one who was supposed to seal the crack left by the one you left in Baltimore.
The rhyme between “before” and “Baltimore” is pleasing, and allowing it to float over five lines shows confidence in the reader. In “What Work Is,” the poet uses slant rhyme (hour/door, mean/citizen). This is also satisfyingly deft, giving us some sonic echo to pin the poem together without calling too much attention to itself.
So much for form, what about content? Buckley Smith writes about relationships, his wife, his kids, his preoccupation with aging, death and loss, sex (some of it adulterous) and its accompanying recriminations and disappointments. Most of it is relatable – yet his appreciation of Marilyn Manson leaves me rather cool, and I’m hoping that his reference to the “savage noises” of sex in “Where the Wild Things Are” is a private joke. Sometimes it’s a bit too grimly confessional. “Stay-at-Home” ends:
My wife works hard. I do the best I can.
No one who looks at me can see a man.
But in general these poems show many sides of life; they are wry, varied and undoubtedly human.
Hilary Menos won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 with Berg (Seren, 2009). Her most recent pamphlet is Vox Wah-Wah (New Walk, 2026). She is editor of The Friday Poem https://www.thefridaypoem.com/.